The Freshness of Green Things and Memories: Building Imagery in Writing SJVWP – Summer Institute 2011 – Demonstration Lesson by Meta Schettler “When I Am in the Kitchen…I think about the past.” Jeanne Marie Beaumont
Outline of Activities for Thursday, June 30th
Brainstorm word bank for “Your Mother’s Kitchen,” a prose poem to be revised for our anthology. – 10 to 15 minutes
Draft “Your Mother’s Kitchen.” – 10 minutes
Share a couple of poems aloud. – 5 minutes
Read and discuss poems by Hayden/Bishop or Dove/Clifton at your tables in pairs with pairs of poems. Introduce image box and share back. – 10 to 15 minutes
One word response – word circle/spontaneous poem.
Exquisite Corpse exercise with image box—2 groups, 15 to 20 minutes
Share a couple of poems aloud. – 5 minutes
Writing reflection on Exquisite Corpse with share back. – 5 minutes
Evaluation feedback form. Thanks for your comments!
Definition of imagery: Language that causes people to imagine pictures in their minds
Purpose of this lesson: 1) To create concrete images in writing; 2) To communicate emotion through imagery in writing; 3) To engage students in collaborative writing;` 4) To tap the intuitive and nonrational aspects of writing.
Lesson Rationale: I teach parts of this lesson in an upper-division writing course which has a 5000 word writing requirement. We do this creative writing toward the end of the course while reading a memoir by Lauralee Summer called Learning Joy From Dogs Without Collars. I use it to give students voice to their own experience and to mirror Summer’s poetic prose from her memoir. In my syllabus I usually label this lesson, “Nurturing Creativity: Lessons for Revision and Style,” to encourage students to transfer these creative techniques to their expository essays. In his introduction to Writing With Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process, Peter Elbow links creativity to the critical thinking required in revision. He tells us, “you will increase critical revising skills by working on creativity” (10). For our Exquisite Corpse exercise in this lesson, Peter Elbow’s Writing With Power is again useful. In Chapter 9, “Writing While Not Thinking About Writing,” he suggests that “It’s a great relief to write seriously and usefully, without thinking about your writing. And it helps the rest of your writing. It makes you more comfortable putting words on paper and it makes those words more natural and lively” (95). The relative anonymity in this exercise and the low-level pressure of only writing one line at a time allows students to open up and risk more in their writing which usually creates satisfying results. This exercise also emphasizes one of Hairston’s twelve principles of a new paradigm for process writing: “It is holistic, viewing writing as an activity that involves the intuitive and nonrational as well as the rational faculties” (qtd. in Totten, 8). Our use of the image box comes from Barry Lane’s After the End: Teaching and Learning Creative Revision where he suggests teaching imagery through poetry with an image box and also the teaching of juxtaposition with the random drawing of images from the box (183). Also, I am including in this packet more activities that I have used from The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach. As Behn and Twichell state in their introduction, their writing activities may yield multiple outcomes such as “a new understanding of the relation of image to meaning, or a way into the unconscious, perhaps a way of marrying autobiography with invention, or a sense of the possibilities of various kinds of structures, ways to bring a dead poem back to life, a new sense of rhythm, or a slight sharpening of the ear” (xiii). All of these results can encourage creative revision and the increased usage of descriptive language in expository essays.
Five Essential Affirmations (from Peter Elbow’s introduction to Writing Alone and With Others):
Everyone has a strong, unique voice.
Everyone is born with creative genius.
Writing as an art form belongs to all people, regardless of economic class or educational level.
The teaching of craft can be done without damage to a writer’s original voice or artistic self-esteem.
A writer is someone who writes.
Writing Exercise 1: Your Mother’s Kitchen -- You must include something green, something dead, the oven, and a female relative walks into the poem. You are not in the poem. This exercise comes from Rita Dove in The Practice of Poetry: Writing Lessons from Poets Who Teach, p. 89.
Definition of a prose poem from poets.org:
Though the name of the form may appear to be a contradiction, the prose poem essentially appears as prose, but reads like poetry. In the first issue of The Prose Poem: An International Journal, editor Peter Johnson explained, “Just as black humor straddles the fine line between comedy and tragedy, so the prose poem plants one foot in prose, the other in poetry, both heels resting precariously on banana peels.”
While it lacks the line breaks associated with poetry, the prose poem maintains a poetic quality, often utilizing techniques common to poetry, such as fragmentation, compression, repetition, and rhyme. The prose poem can range in length from a few lines to several pages long, and it may explore a limitless array of styles and subjects. http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5787
For homework, you should revise “Your Mother’s Kitchen,” and you can add line breaks then if you wish.
Poem 1 Sestina by Elizabeth Bishop
September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.
She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,
It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac
on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.
It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.
But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.
Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house. Poem 2 Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden (from Every Shut Eye Ain’t Asleep) Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices? (Audio at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175758)
Poem 3 Sunday Greens by Rita Dove (from Thomas and Beulah) She wants to hear wine pouring. She wants to taste change. She wants pride to roar through the kitchen till it shines like straw, she wants
lean to replace tradition. Ham knocks in the pot, nothing but bones, each with its bracelet of flesh.
The house stinks like a zoo in summer, while upstairs her man sleeps on. Robe slung over her arm and the cradled hymnal,
she pauses, remembers her mother in a slip lost in blues, and those collards, wild-eared, singing.
Poem 4 Cutting Greens by Lucille Clifton (from Every Shut Eye Ain’t Asleep) curling them around i hold their bodies in obscene embrace thinking of everything but kinship. collards and kale strain against each strange other away from my kissmaking hand and the iron bedpot. the pot is black, the cutting board is black, my hand, and just for a minute the greens roll black under the knife, and the kitchen twists dark on its spine and i taste in my natural appetite the bond of live things everywhere.
Lucille Clifton and Rita Dove, photo from poets.org
Discussion question for poetry: What images are memorable or powerful in these poems, and how do the images reinforce or create meaning within the poem? Writing Exercise 2: Exquisite Corpse – this was a parlor game of the Surrealists, and it’s an excellent collaborative writing exercise that makes writing poetry as easy as pie. We will use an image box as suggested by Barry Lane in Afterthe End: Teaching and Learning Creative Revision, Ch. 13, “Words in Collision: Revising Poems.” Each person will pull 2 images from the box to use in her first line.
Writing Exercise 3 (for another time): Ten-Minute Spill (also from Rita Dove in The Practice of Poetry, p. 13). Choose 5 out of 8 words from the following list: cliff, needle, whir, voice, blackberry, cloud, mother, lick. Brainstorm with your class a list of vernacular sayings, proverbs and familiar phrases such as “between the devil and deep blue sea,” “kill two birds with one stone,” “she’s a brick house,” “don’t judge a book by its cover,” etc. Write them on the board. You must include ONE of these lines in your poem, and you must also alter it in some way to make it new and make it your own. The poem should have ten lines, and you only have ten minutes. Go!
Writing Exercise 4 (also for another time):Five Easy Pieces (from Richard Jackson in The Practice of Poetry, p. 40—a challenging exercise because of the last required step, but my students have written beautiful poems with this exercise.) First, you need to think of a person you know well or invent a person, and also think of a context for this person, and then include the five following “pieces” in your poem: 1) Describe the person’s hands. 2) Describe something she is doing with her hands. 3) Use a metaphor to say something about some exotic place (my emphasis because “exotic” is a bit of a loaded term.) 4) Write a question you would like to ask this person in the context of 2 and 3. 5) The person looks up or toward you and gives you an answer that suggests that she only understood part of what you said.
Selected Bibliography Behn, Robin, and Twichell, Chase, eds. The Practice of Poetry: Writing Lessons from Poets Who Teach. New York: HarperPerennial, 1992. Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems: 1927-1979. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1983. Dove, Rita. Thomas and Beulah. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1986. Elbow, Peter. Writing With Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Harper, Michael S., and Walton, Anthony, eds. Every Shut Eye Ain’t Asleep: An Anthology of Poetry by African Americans Since 1945. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1994. Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York: Random House, 1994. Lane, Barry. Afterthe End: Teaching and Learning Creative Revision. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1993. Rothman, Julia, Volvoski, Jenny, and Lamothe, Matt. The Exquisite Book: 100 Artists Play a Collaborative Game. New York: Chronicle Books, 2010. Schneider, Pat, and Elbow, Peter. Writing Alone and With Others. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Totten, Samuel, “Completing the Paradigm Shift to Process Writing: The Need to Lead.” The Quarterly. Vol. 25: No. 1, Winter 2003.
FEEDBACK QUESTIONS (please detach this page from your packet to return to me):
What did you enjoy most about the lesson? What did you enjoy least, and why?
Did you see a part of the lesson that might be adapted for your classroom and your particular student population? If so, what would you use?
Did the research provided give adequate support for the principles taught in the lesson?
SJVWP – Summer Institute 2011 – Demonstration Lesson by Meta Schettler
“When I Am in the Kitchen…I think about the past.” Jeanne Marie Beaumont
Outline of Activities for Thursday, June 30th
Definition of imagery:
Language that causes people to imagine pictures in their minds
Purpose of this lesson:
1) To create concrete images in writing;
2) To communicate emotion through imagery in writing;
3) To engage students in collaborative writing;`
4) To tap the intuitive and nonrational aspects of writing.
Lesson Rationale: I teach parts of this lesson in an upper-division writing course which has a 5000 word writing requirement. We do this creative writing toward the end of the course while reading a memoir by Lauralee Summer called Learning Joy From Dogs Without Collars. I use it to give students voice to their own experience and to mirror Summer’s poetic prose from her memoir. In my syllabus I usually label this lesson, “Nurturing Creativity: Lessons for Revision and Style,” to encourage students to transfer these creative techniques to their expository essays. In his introduction to Writing With Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process, Peter Elbow links creativity to the critical thinking required in revision. He tells us, “you will increase critical revising skills by working on creativity” (10). For our Exquisite Corpse exercise in this lesson, Peter Elbow’s Writing With Power is again useful. In Chapter 9, “Writing While Not Thinking About Writing,” he suggests that “It’s a great relief to write seriously and usefully, without thinking about your writing. And it helps the rest of your writing. It makes you more comfortable putting words on paper and it makes those words more natural and lively” (95). The relative anonymity in this exercise and the low-level pressure of only writing one line at a time allows students to open up and risk more in their writing which usually creates satisfying results. This exercise also emphasizes one of Hairston’s twelve principles of a new paradigm for process writing: “It is holistic, viewing writing as an activity that involves the intuitive and nonrational as well as the rational faculties” (qtd. in Totten, 8). Our use of the image box comes from Barry Lane’s After the End: Teaching and Learning Creative Revision where he suggests teaching imagery through poetry with an image box and also the teaching of juxtaposition with the random drawing of images from the box (183).
Also, I am including in this packet more activities that I have used from The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach. As Behn and Twichell state in their introduction, their writing activities may yield multiple outcomes such as “a new understanding of the relation of image to meaning, or a way into the unconscious, perhaps a way of marrying autobiography with invention, or a sense of the possibilities of various kinds of structures, ways to bring a dead poem back to life, a new sense of rhythm, or a slight sharpening of the ear” (xiii). All of these results can encourage creative revision and the increased usage of descriptive language in expository essays.
Five Essential Affirmations (from Peter Elbow’s introduction to Writing Alone and With Others):
Writing Exercise 1: Your Mother’s Kitchen -- You must include something green, something dead, the oven, and a female relative walks into the poem. You are not in the poem. This exercise comes from Rita Dove in The Practice of Poetry: Writing Lessons from Poets Who Teach, p. 89.
Definition of a prose poem from poets.org:
Though the name of the form may appear to be a contradiction, the prose poem essentially appears as prose, but reads like poetry. In the first issue of The Prose Poem: An International Journal, editor Peter Johnson explained, “Just as black humor straddles the fine line between comedy and tragedy, so the prose poem plants one foot in prose, the other in poetry, both heels resting precariously on banana peels.”
While it lacks the line breaks associated with poetry, the prose poem maintains a poetic quality, often utilizing techniques common to poetry, such as fragmentation, compression, repetition, and rhyme. The prose poem can range in length from a few lines to several pages long, and it may explore a limitless array of styles and subjects. http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5787
For homework, you should revise “Your Mother’s Kitchen,” and you can add line breaks then if you wish.
Poem 1
Sestina by Elizabeth Bishop
September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.
She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,
It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac
on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.
It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.
But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.
Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.
Poem 2
Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden
(from Every Shut Eye Ain’t Asleep)
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
(Audio at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175758)
Poem 3
Sunday Greens by Rita Dove
(from Thomas and Beulah)
She wants to hear
wine pouring.
She wants to taste
change. She wants
pride to roar through
the kitchen till it shines
like straw, she wants
lean to replace
tradition. Ham knocks
in the pot, nothing
but bones, each
with its bracelet
of flesh.
The house stinks
like a zoo in summer,
while upstairs
her man sleeps on.
Robe slung over
her arm and
the cradled hymnal,
she pauses, remembers
her mother in a slip
lost in blues,
and those collards,
wild-eared,
singing.
Poem 4
Cutting Greens by Lucille Clifton
(from Every Shut Eye Ain’t Asleep)
curling them around
i hold their bodies in obscene embrace
thinking of everything but kinship.
collards and kale
strain against each strange other
away from my kissmaking hand and
the iron bedpot.
the pot is black,
the cutting board is black,
my hand,
and just for a minute
the greens roll black under the knife,
and the kitchen twists dark on its spine
and i taste in my natural appetite
the bond of live things everywhere.
Lucille Clifton and Rita Dove, photo from poets.org
Discussion question for poetry: What images are memorable or powerful in these poems, and how do the images reinforce or create meaning within the poem?
Writing Exercise 2: Exquisite Corpse – this was a parlor game of the Surrealists, and it’s an excellent collaborative writing exercise that makes writing poetry as easy as pie. We will use an image box as suggested by Barry Lane in After the End: Teaching and Learning Creative Revision, Ch. 13, “Words in Collision: Revising Poems.” Each person will pull 2 images from the box to use in her first line.
Writing Exercise 3 (for another time): Ten-Minute Spill (also from Rita Dove in The Practice of Poetry, p. 13). Choose 5 out of 8 words from the following list: cliff, needle, whir, voice, blackberry, cloud, mother, lick. Brainstorm with your class a list of vernacular sayings, proverbs and familiar phrases such as “between the devil and deep blue sea,” “kill two birds with one stone,” “she’s a brick house,” “don’t judge a book by its cover,” etc. Write them on the board. You must include ONE of these lines in your poem, and you must also alter it in some way to make it new and make it your own. The poem should have ten lines, and you only have ten minutes. Go!
Writing Exercise 4 (also for another time): Five Easy Pieces (from Richard Jackson in The Practice of Poetry, p. 40—a challenging exercise because of the last required step, but my students have written beautiful poems with this exercise.) First, you need to think of a person you know well or invent a person, and also think of a context for this person, and then include the five following “pieces” in your poem: 1) Describe the person’s hands. 2) Describe something she is doing with her hands. 3) Use a metaphor to say something about some exotic place (my emphasis because “exotic” is a bit of a loaded term.) 4) Write a question you would like to ask this person in the context of 2 and 3. 5) The person looks up or toward you and gives you an answer that suggests that she only understood part of what you said.
Selected Bibliography
Behn, Robin, and Twichell, Chase, eds. The Practice of Poetry: Writing Lessons from Poets Who Teach. New York: HarperPerennial, 1992.
Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems: 1927-1979. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1983.
Dove, Rita. Thomas and Beulah. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1986.
Elbow, Peter. Writing With Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Harper, Michael S., and Walton, Anthony, eds. Every Shut Eye Ain’t Asleep: An Anthology of Poetry by African Americans Since 1945. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1994.
Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York: Random House, 1994.
Lane, Barry. After the End: Teaching and Learning Creative Revision. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1993.
Rothman, Julia, Volvoski, Jenny, and Lamothe, Matt. The Exquisite Book: 100 Artists Play a Collaborative Game. New York: Chronicle Books, 2010.
Schneider, Pat, and Elbow, Peter. Writing Alone and With Others. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Totten, Samuel, “Completing the Paradigm Shift to Process Writing: The Need to Lead.” The Quarterly. Vol. 25: No. 1, Winter 2003.
FEEDBACK QUESTIONS (please detach this page from your packet to return to me):